The Hotmail team are sniffing based on firefox version but if sniffing must be done, it should be done by gecko version instead which will then take the cross section of browsers. It goes to show the kind of uproar and community excluded when sniffing is done wrong.

The article is also a little bit of flamebait when it says hotmail is in part run on Linux. All parts of Hotmail run in Windows Server. They use Akamai for caching static files such as images - as do many Microsoft services. Akamai reports they use Linux though.

It indicates that someone at Hotmail was using User-Agent sniffing to determine when to suggest browser upgrades.

Which is a fundamentally stupid thing to do.

> Which is a fundamentally stupid thing to do.

Well recommending an upgrade isn't too bad... preventing users from accessing the site is just ludicrous.

Changing the User-Agent string, pointlessly removing identifying markers, that's not "fundamentally stupid"?

You do know that most browsers let you change the User-Agent string to whatever you like?

This won't keep out IceWeasel users who actually understand the machine they are operating.

And motivations that you don't understand are not necessarily stupid. If you don't understand why it was important enough to the debian core team to bother with the effort of maintaining a forked version version of the browser; you are not able to comment intelligently on the topic.